A father has been charged with killing his 23-year-old son, after he allegedly engineered what appeared to be a gruesome accident four years ago.

Karl Karlsen, 52, of Romulus, New York, told police that he found Levi Karlsen's lifeless body in the family barn in November 2008.

It appeared that the pickup truck that Levi was working on had slipped off its jack and crushed him to death. The death was ruled as a 'tragic accident' but investigators reopened the case on new information in March.

Well-planned accident: Police believe that Karl Karlsen staged the death of his 23-year-old son in order to collect life insurance money

On Friday, Karl Karlsen was charged with murdering his son for insurance money. Investigators are now re-examining a house fire that killed Karlsen's first wife in 1991.

Police reopened the case on Levi Karlsen's death when they discovered that just before his son died, Karl had taken out a new and large life insurance policy in Levi's name.

The new policy named Karl as sole beneficiary instead of Levi's two young children. Investigators then took another look at
the circumstances surrounding the alleged accident.

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They concluded that
Karl Karlsen had made the pickup truck fall on his son, crushing and trapping him under its weight. Karl then went out to a family
gathering, returning four hours later to make a show of discovering his
son's body and telling his wife, Cindy, to call 911.

Karl is charged with murdering Levi, disguising it as an accident and then picking up the insurance money.

'To think that a father could cause a vehicle to fall off a jack
crushing his son and then leave for four hours, knowing all the time
that his son was pinned under the truck apparently dead, is
unconscionable,' Seneca County Sheriff Jack Stenberg said.

Levi Karlsen, father of two young children, was crushed to death by a pickup truck at his family's farm

'Then, to put on an act for arriving first responders was part of a well-planned event staged by Karl Karlsen,' Stenberg added.

But this might not be the first time Karlsen has claimed insurance money in suspicious, possibly murderous, circumstances.

Now police are looking into a fire in Karl Karlsen's former home in California that killed his first wife, Christena Karlsen, on New Year's Day in 1991.

The sheriff's office declined to give further details on Saturday. But Art Alexander, Christena's father and Levi Karlsen's grandfather, told the Syracuse Post-Standard that he had always been suspicious. And Alexander's doubts had grown over the years.

Karl Karlsen claimed that the fire had started while he was in the garage and that he had been able to save his son and two daughters, but not his wife.

But as Alexander explains, not all the evidence adds up.

Karl Karlsen has been charged with murdering his son and will be reinvestigated for a fire that killed his first wife. He collected insurance payouts on both occasions

Alexander explains that one investigator told him that the children would have been covered in soot if they had been in the house during the fire. Yet when he arrived on the scene the children were unharmed and clean.

He also claims that he was shown multiple 'flash points' where the fire had started. According to Karlsen's story there should have been only one.

While Alexander did have concerns he says that he couldn't confront Karlsen as he wanted to stay in touch with his family.

'I couldn’t tell him what I thought,” he told the Post-Standard. 'It would alienate me from my grandkids.'

'Just to keep it bottled up - it was the hardest thing I ever did in my life,' Alexander said.

Following Friday's developments, authorities are now looking into this suspicious blaze.

Karlsen received $200,000 in insurance money from this fire and moved from California to New York with his children.

In New York, Karl Karlsen used this payout to buy the property in Romulus - the place where Levi Karlsen died.

The family farm in upstate New York where Levi Karlsen died. Karl Karlsen bought the property with insurance money paid out from a suspicious fire that killed his first wife